Werd I/O

As part of my role leading technology for The 19th, I’m hiring a web applications engineer:

‌In this role, you will work closely with a cross-functional group of journalists, designers, product managers and engineers to advance our mission to empower those we serve — particularly women, women of color and the LGBTQ+ community — with the information, resources and community they need to be equal participants in our democracy. You will work most closely with our CTO and product engineer to continue to develop our WordPress-based web platform, kickstart our open-source strategy, support decentralized republishing of our content and build tools to support our newsroom.

This is the most equity-minded team I’ve ever worked on, and it’s a joyful, empathetic, kind place to be. If you’re interested, please apply.

If you have any questions, you can email me at ben@benwerd.com, or feel free to book a short phone call.

So, Medium has a new CEO, who happens to be someone I like very much.

I worked at Medium in the publications group for a year. It was a pretty daunting experience: my first time working with the kind of budget Medium enjoyed, and with people who were veterans of all the products I knew and loved. I was used to being an outsider, and found myself on a world-class team trying to build something that promoted positive discourse. Honestly, although I had to level up in all kinds of ways, my biggest challenge there was managing the anxiety of working around so many people I looked up to. Happily, a lot of the people I worked with remain very good friends; if I hadn’t been asked to join Matter as Director of Investments, an opportunity I couldn’t say no to, I would have stayed for a lot longer.

My first real interaction with Ev while I was there centered around the open web. Coming from an indieweb context, I was a bit guarded: I didn’t think Medium probably had exactly my priorities, and I was a little worried that the indieweb community might think I’d sold out. The jury’s out on the indieweb community (I don’t think mostly anyone cared), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ev cares deeply about the web, was interested in deep interoperability, and believes in the health of the ecosystem as well as the discourse on it.

I’ve known Tony Stubblebine for longer. He was working on Crowdvine while I was working on Elgg; different products, but playing in a similar-enough space that we often found ourselves at the same meetups and in the same discussions. He’s a thoughtful, kind person who is also very analytical, and has always given me good advice. He built a really strong community with Coach.me, both inside and out, and he’s been a really strong champion of Medium’s own community.

So I couldn’t be more excited about two things: Tony taking over as CEO, and Ev going to investigate new ideas as part of a new holding company. I can’t wait to see what they both do next.

Do I know these reminders are annoying? Yes. Am I going to keep posting anyway? Also yes.

Our house went on the market yesterday: offers starting at $849K for a three bed, 2.5 bath home in Santa Rosa with a split-level deck and in-ground pool. There are beautiful, hardwood floors throughout (we installed them when we moved in), vaulted ceilings, and I can confirm that being there is very nice. Maybe you’re sick of San Francisco, or Austin, or New York, and you want a relaxing oasis that is also very close to the action? We wrote about our experiences in the house, and there are a lot of nearby amenities. Did I mention the nearby parks, hiking, and bike trails? I should probably write some more about that.

Anyway, here’s the website, and here’s the Zillow profile. Go take a look.

A little earlier this year, I mentioned that I was building an indieweb real estate website.

Preparing a home for sale is more difficult than I’d accounted for. Digging our worldly possessions out of it, and then ensuring that the house was in the best shape it could be, took a lot of time. And in the meantime, a lot of life happened.

Our family home in Santa Rosa is finally going on the market this week. And, although I’ll likely keep working on it, I have my indieweb website ready to go.

When I initially brought up the idea, I set myself two main restrictions. I said it needed to be online in two weeks, and I blew through that by months. But I also said:

It needs to get an A for SEO, site performance, and security.

It does. Here are its core web vitals via web.dev:

And its security rating via Mozilla Observatory:

It helped that I hand-rolled the site.

You might note that performance remains at 97/100, while the other metrics are at 100. There is still a Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.14 seconds, which is almost certainly because there are a lot of images on the page which have dynamic heights and widths depending on the viewport. There’s more I can do there to make those images a predictable size.

There are a handful of non-obvious things I had to do. For example, both MLS and land parcels have a numeric identifier. If you view this on a phone, the mobile browser tries to intelligently turn those into phone numbers, creating unnecessary links. I didn’t want to link out to a third-party site for MLS or land parcels, but it turns out you can suppress automatic phone number linking with the following meta tag:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

Each image is loaded from an image set; I hand-resized them for various reasonable viewport sizes. I also created independently-cropped images for Twitter and Facebook.

To get the highest security rating possible, I made sure there was no inline code (no inline stylesheets or JS), and created a Content Security Policy that I apply via an .htaccess file.

Finally, I said:

It’ll be a hand-rolled static site. No frameworks for the HTML, JS, or CSS, and no pre-set templates: just me, a text editor, and some design tools.

And that’s what I did. I wrote the HTML and CSS from scratch in VS Code, making liberal use of media queries and CSS grids. And I had a lot of fun doing it.

My full code (which is really simple!) is available on GitHub, but the most exciting way to take a look is to view the website itself at 5405spainave.com.

And if you want a beautiful wine country home in Santa Rosa, California, you know who to talk to.

*

Some other ideas that came up:

What about video or virtual reality? We didn’t have a professionally-produced video of the home. We do have professionally-taken photographs, which I’ve used liberally. I took some of the others (eg of wineries and Bodega Bay), and the rest came from Unsplash.

What if we accepted crypto for the home? It’s too difficult to do; agents, escrow, legal frameworks are not set up for this. Also, at least one member of our family makes a particular kind of face whenever crypto is mentioned. It had occurred to me that we could push the selling price for crypto sales a little higher: eg, sure, we’ll take your ETH or BTC, but the dollar equivalent will be $2M. (If you would like to give us two million dollars for our home, please do get in touch.)

What about a blog or regularly-updated content? Home sales in California are incredibly short. We could have written a blog about getting the home ready, but honestly, it was already a stressful enough process. We anticipate a very short sales window for the home itself, so we didn’t do it. I’ll likely add more narrative description in the our experience page.

And analytics? The site doesn’t set any cookies or collect any analytics on the front end. However, I do push it through Cloudflare’s CDN, which gives me some simple stats to gauge success.

It’s a very simple website. Yes. And often, that’s all you need.